


House of Wolves

by witch_lit



Category: The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, M/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, side Isabelle/Clary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 05:30:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13140048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witch_lit/pseuds/witch_lit
Summary: With flames licking his feet and a hard glint in his eyes, Alec is more than happy to make a deal with a devil.





	House of Wolves

**Author's Note:**

> This story alludes to a lot of nasty $hit, up to and including child abuse/violations of consent done unto a child, murder, and being so desperate you'll do near anything. Prompts included angst and soulmates, I'm pretty sure I delivered. NOTHING IS GRAPHIC.

When Alexander Lightwood is born, the timer on his wrist reads an impossible year. His parents look at each other and frown. Their son’s soulmate, with so many years left on their life printed on their son’s wrist, must be a Downworlder. Not an appropriate match for a Shadowhunter at all.

 

 

When Magnus Bane is born, his mother looks at his wrist in confusion. There are far too many years printed on his wrist. His soulmate, whoever they are, will die in hundreds of years. When he opens his eyes, the eyes of a _monster_ , she thinks she understands.

 

 

Not long after Isabelle is born, with a reasonable number of years on her wrist ( _thank the angel_ , Maryse whispers), the circle loses its fight against the Clave. Valentine is gone, _dead_ , and all that’s left is to punish the traitors. The Lightwoods are bound to New York, and achieve leniency through their children. The loss humbles them, and though they are more sharp edges of anger than parents they soften with time.

They are never quite soft enough. They are never quite parents that Jace, Isabelle, Alec or Max can look up to. They are there, and sometimes that is enough. Often, it isn’t. They are all bruised and care only for each other.

 

 

 

Jace lights the cigarette. Max is on Alec’s hip, huddled into Alec’s chest for warmth. Isabelle is fourteen and will take any challenge you throw her way. All of the doors are locked, and Alec can’t hear his mother calling out his name over the crackling of the fire. There is snow on the ground, but it does not stop the flames.

The New York Institute is in ashes, and they will not be pushed around any longer. They don’t have anywhere else to go, but they will figure it out.

 

 

 

Alec is sixteen and sells his soul for a life in the mundane world. He gets a better future for his siblings, mundane identification and enough money to keep all of them comfortable while they figure out the rest of their lives. He makes sure that no one in the shadow world will remember them and in return gets himself an expiration date.

In nearby Brooklyn, with thousands of people between them, a warlock is too drunk to notice that the timer on his left wrist has gone from sixty something years to ten. It’s Christmas, and he’s alone again.

He will find out in the morning that the New York Institute has been burned to the ground. He will become one of the only authority figures the shadow world has in New York, and he will have to shoulder some of the demon hunting responsibility that the Shadowhunters had carried. He will not notice that his soulmate will die much sooner than expected until a week later, when he finally bathes in a real bath tub and has time to himself.

 

 

 

When Isabelle is sixteen, she gets a taste for the Downworld that none of her brothers can temper. Her and Jace are the same—they spend their weekends at the Downworlder club, Pandemonium. Sometimes, when they want to give Alec a heart attack, they’ll corner and kill a demon. As nervous as it makes Alec to be so close to the life they left behind, he lets them do it.

They need to be connected to something, and even Alec knows the peers at their school are lackluster. They could never understand, never relate, to what the Lightwoods have gone through. They need a release. He can’t be all they have, and he understands that. He stays home with Max half of the time and helps with Max’s fourth grade homework. He tells Max about runes and demons and the Downworld and whatever he asks for, but Max will never yearn for it the way that Isabelle and Jace do. To Max, Shadowhunters are little more than Jace and Isabelle letting loose on the weekends.

 

 

 

Alec is eighteen and Isabelle has convinced him to go to a party. It is at the home of a prominent Warlock, and Alec only agrees to go if Jace and Isabelle promise to keep their runes covered. They’ll never get in otherwise, and it would create more questions than any of them want to provide answers for.

At the party, Isabelle meets a green-eyed girl who makes her feel alive like nothing else. _This is the one_ , Isabelle thinks. The girl will bring more trouble into their lives than either of them could possibly imagine, but they don’t know that. The girl has no marks and Isabelle doesn’t know how she relates so much to a mundane.

They exchange phone numbers and wide smiles, and at the time, Alec is happy for his sister. He’s worried, because that’s who he’ll always be, and there aren’t many mundanes at this downworlders party.

They leave the warlock’s house but Isabelle leaves her heart in the hands of a beautiful red-haired girl named Clary.

 

 

 

Alec never talks about how they got the new life they have, and Jace and Isabelle never ask. They know he made a deal, but they don’t know the consequences. They don’t know with whom. They don’t want to. Max used to ask, but he knows the steel in Alec’s frown. He stops asking. Maybe they think it’s their parents’ money, which isn’t entirely untrue. Maybe they think he went to a warlock.

That’s closer to the truth, but they won’t have expected for him to have made a deal with a devil. He’s never so much as killed a demon, has never shown an interest in their hunting parties outside of keeping them safe. They don’t know who he made a deal with to erase them from the eye of the shadow world. They don’t know that he’ll die; ten years from the day he struck the deal, pulled into Hell or Edom by the hounds of the devil himself.

 

 

 

At eighteen, Alec is wary of Clary Fray. She has enough heart for two people, but she is impulsive and risk prone. Clary finds out that she is a Shadowhunter and pulls Isabelle into the Shadow World headfirst. She takes Isabelle to the new New York Institute and somehow misses the way the world presses closer to Isabelle. The Institute is an invisible hand on her throat.

Isabelle has runes. They are littered across her skin, and when she follows Clary into the lair of the Silent Brothers and doesn’t die the Shadowhunters demanding to know more about Clary become suspicious. They think, maybe, this is a strong mundane. Maybe mundanes have always been able to visit the Silent City.

When they return from the Silent City, Isabelle texts Jace and Alec a name. Alec doesn’t know who Magnus Bane is, but he’s the answer to all of Clary’s questions.

Alec tells Isabelle he won’t call her in sick to school, so they had better wait to pursue this man until the weekend. Isabelle says that she doesn’t care, that Clary _needs to know what happened to her_ , and Alec realizes that he’s underestimated Clary Fray. Her grip on Isabelle is strong, and Alec wonders if this is teenage rebellion or if it’s just a new manifestation of Isabelle’s desire to throw herself at any challenge.

There’s a party at Magnus Bane’s house on Friday Night, and Isabelle agrees to attend school if she can go to the party with Clary to get answers from him. Alec agrees, but needs to go with.

Isabelle attends school alongside Jace, twitchy with the desire for the weekend to be here already. Alec keeps him phone on him in the kitchen where he works, ready at any time to get a call that one of his siblings is skipping class. It never rings.

Isabelle seems to understand, at least, that going to the new Institute might be dangerous. Clary is spending all of her time there, but Isabelle cannot do the same. She has no idea how long her protection against the Shadow World will last, and if it’ll even matter if someone sees her runes.

On Friday night, Isabelle does Clary’s hair and makeup and tells her girlfriend that she is the most beautiful Shadowhunter that Isabelle has ever met.

 _That’s because you’ve only met me and the girls from the Institute,_ Clary giggles. She’s excited, but also wants to get on with the night. She’s eager to learn more about herself, and she doesn’t know that she’s putting Isabelle at risk. She doesn’t know that Isabelle wouldn’t be wearing long sleeves of her own accord.

Clary has never known Isabelle to show much of her skin, no matter how intimate they get. She thinks it might be image issues, because enough teen girls have them, but she doesn’t _know_. Doesn’t question long sleeves in fall weather, even if they suspect the party will be loud and hot and crowded.

Jace pulls three pins out of Clary’s hair and her glamorous up-do crumbles into fiery waves. He’s never been good at minding his own business. Clary looks outraged, but he shrugs and tells her that she looks like a person again. Isabelle looks offended, and Alec knows that tensions are already high and arguments are brewing.

He compliments Clary on her looks and leads them to Brooklyn and Magnus Bane. They sit in a line on the subway, Jace teasing Clary and grating on Isabelle’s nerves. Alec tucked Max into bed before they left, but he knows Max will be up again to read his Japanese comics once he’s sure Alec is gone. Alec doesn’t mind, as long as Max doesn’t get into any trouble.

They meet Magnus Bane, and Alec feels a longing stir inside of him. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like to want things for himself, and this man, this _warlock_ , is jovial and handsome and involved in hiding Clary’s past. Alec shouldn’t get too attached.

When Magnus Bane turns out to be a dead end, because he doesn’t own any of Clary’s memories, he just worked to keep Clary from seeing the Downworld, Alec expects he’ll never hear from the Warlock again. Magnus hadn’t seemed too pleased by so many mundanes at his party, eyes looking at Jace and Isabelle with obvious distaste.

That night, Alec finds a phone number printed on his arm under the name Magnus. It’s accented with a little heart, and Alec doesn’t remember Magnus writing it. He probably magicked it on when he grabbed Alec’s wrist.

It could be a dangerous move, pulling magic on a mundane. Alec clearly knew about the Downworld through Clary, and if Alec was a mundane, such a move might have delighted and intrigued him. As it was, Alec was intrigued anyway.

Alec saves Magnus’s phone number but didn’t call the warlock. He follows Clary’s adventures figuring out her heritage from a distance, trying to pull Isabelle and Jace out of harm’s way when they rush in without thinking. He’s not sure that he’s successful.

Clary finds out that her mother’s best friend and father figure is a werewolf the same night said father figure almost dies protecting her from his own pack. Isabelle and Jace are there: _of course they are_. They follow Clary around like she’s their last breath of air.

They take Luke to Magnus, because Clary seems to think that he owes her. Alec meets them there, furious that they ended up in a werewolf feud and relieved that his siblings are safe. Jace and Clary’s friend Simon are gone, out to find ingredients for a remedy that will help Luke heal, and Magnus is running out of power. He staggers, but Alec catches him.

 _I need more energy,_ he says. _I can’t keep this up._

Alec looks at his sister’s wide eyes and the pallor of Magnus’s face. He links his fingers through Magnus’s, and says, _take mine._

Magnus nods, but tells him a mundane probably won’t have enough energy to sustain him for long. Alec knows what he’s risking.

Minutes pass and the only thing keeping Luke alive is the stream of magic passing from Magnus’s fingertips. Isabelle is helping Clary finish the remedy, but mostly Isabelle is keeping Clary as calm as possible while they wait for the boys.

Magnus is pressed against Alec’s chest, and Alec knows any respectable mundane would have passed out by now. Instead, he continues to support Magnus, because he knows Isabelle won’t be able to support Clary’s grief if Luke dies. She will not have empathy when the loss of her own father was a relief.

At the end of the day, Alec is a man who loves his family and will do anything to protect them. If that means outing himself to Magnus, he’ll do what he has to. For his own good, he hopes that Magnus will stay silent.

Jace and Simon appear, ingredients in hand, just as Alec approaches his limit. They finish the brew and feed it to Luke, who is worse for wear but undeniably alive. Magnus stays pressed up against Alec’s chest as the others move Luke to his bedroom.

“You’re not a mundane,” Magnus says softly. Only Alec is with him in the room.

“Tell anyone and I’ll have to kill you,” Alec promises. He can smell the New York Institute burning. He can’t count on one hand how many people died that day. Hodge. His parents. Visiting dignitaries that are always just monsters in masks. No one he would mourn, not when he had siblings to protect.

Magnus has a calculating look in his eyes. He nods, and stands to tend to Luke. Alec starts putting Magnus’s apartment back together, because his family and Clary create a tornado through any landscape.

That night, even after seeing some of his hard edges, Magnus offers Alec a drink. Alec doesn’t understand it, because he just threatened Magnus, but he lets it go. He accepts, and wonders if this is the start of something.

 

 

 

Alec is nineteen when Magnus Bane kisses him for the first time. It’s Christmas, and the timer on Magnus’s wrist has just ticked down to seven years. The clock could correspond to anyone, except Alec knows exactly when he’s going to die and it’s written on Magnus’s wrist.

He accepts the kiss because this is his soulmate. He’s been softening to the warlock, who never promises more than he can give and has kept Alec’s secret for a year. He’d be lying is he said he didn’t want this. He’s got seven years. That’ll be enough time.

 

 

 

Isabelle is seventeen and her girlfriend’s father is trying to kill her. Valentine is uprooting every stable footing Isabelle has ever had with Clary, and it’s killing her. Valentine, with his hands clutched around the mortal sword, pulls the truth from her lips like a thousand hooks are scraping her soul from her body.

Isabelle can’t hide anymore, and her runes _burn_. Jace protects her for as long as he can fight off the man who raised him, but Valentine leaves with a stricken Clary. She doesn’t look back at Isabelle, who lied to her for more than a year.

Isabelle is seventeen and heartbroken. She’s scared for her girlfriend, and determined to find her, but scared of what will happen if she does. She had lied to Clary for so long.

If the questions start, she won’t know how to answer them. No one remembers that she’s the daughter of the late Robert and Maryse Lightwood. She has runes and training and no explanation for either. She is marked. She can’t claim ignorance.

 

 

 

Max is ten and seeing his siblings oscillate between fear and fortified outer shells makes him wonder why anyone would ever want to be a Shadowhunter, if all it is is fear and pain. He’s in fifth grade and every Thursday Alec takes him to the anime club at the public library and he doesn’t think he’d ever want to be anything more than mundane, if this is what it’s like. He thinks he might like to try the history club, more grounded in mundane reality, if it’ll help him hold onto this life.

Jace helps Isabelle find Clary. They track her down because the Clave refuses to, believing she’s a traitor to their cause. It takes months of searching.

Their patience is gone, and not even Magnus can help them. Clary has disappeared, and Isabelle is as hollow as a mannequin’s grip. She’s reckless like she hasn’t been since a warlock party introduced her to Clary. She reminds Alec of the Old Institute, with barbed pats on the back around every corner. A threat every time you get complacent.

Alec can’t stand to see his sister like this, so he helps search for Clary. They all spend a lot of time at Magnus’s loft. After weeks of going over to Magnus’s and staying too late, Alec brings Max along. Max works on his homework and occasionally bothers his siblings but is otherwise quiet. Magnus knows how much trust is in his hands, even if he and Alec have only been together a short amount of time.

It’s the weekend, and everyone has crashed at Magnus’s loft. Max is on the couch, a pile of historical comics near his feet.

Alec is in Magnus’s bed, and when he holds Magnus’s face between his hands he somehow feels like he’s got the whole world in his grasp. He loves his siblings, but.

But he loves Magnus too.

He loves the gentle way that Magnus wakes him in the morning, the husk in his voice when he laughs. He loves that Magnus has kept his promise, that Isabelle and Jace and Max are all safe from the Clave. For now.

He didn’t expect to love Magnus so much so soon, but it’s too late to turn back now.

 

 

 

Isabelle is seventeen years old when she dies. She is seventeen when she is murdered by the father of the girl that she loves. She is at Lake Lynn, a place that is deadly to Shadowhunters, but no one knows what she is. Valentine pushes her into the lake.

Later, Isabelle will come to with the imprint of an angel on her soul. Her lungs will be free of poisoned water and of her own blood. Beautiful red curls will block her view of the sun, and tears will fall from perfect green eyes. Clary will say, _I love you_. The watch printed on Clary’s wrist will read zero, and Isabelle will know that this is the girl she’s meant to be with for the rest of her life.

Isabelle died, but Clary bargained with an angel to bring her back.

 

 

 

Jace is eighteen and sick of watching his siblings fall in love without him. He’s sick of hiding, though he knows why they have. He’s sick of public school and cable television, of workouts that can’t catch up with him. He’s sick of watching Clary fight demons when he’s known how to handle a seraph blade since he was a toddler.

Jace is eighteen and sick of hiding. He begins to join Clary on hunts, though she is with other, Clave-approved Shadowhunters. He sticks to the shadows, but does not remain unnoticed for long.

One of the Shadowhunters corners him and he thinks about killing her but decides against it. It is not long before Clary and the other Shadowhunter come running. Both of them recognize Jace as Clary’s supposedly mundane soulmate’s brother. Only Clary recognizes the danger of the situation, of an animal trapped into a corner.

Clary does not know that the Lightwoods are capable of terrible things, only that Jace has always been reckless. They take Jace in and confirm that he’s a shadowhunter, but they cannot pry a word from his lips. They will get permission to use the Soul Sword to pry the truth out of him, but for now they pour their resources into finding the other Lightwoods.

 

 

 

Alec is twenty and he wishes his adopted brother had a modicum of common sense in his thick head. He sends Max to school and tells Magnus to take care of his youngest brother. Magnus looks worried, but he agrees.

Alec and Isabelle turn themselves in to the Clave. They say that they ran away from an orphanage in Alicante, and the deal Alec made is stronger than the soul sword that had been tainted by Valentine. Alec hates being in the Institute.

He doesn’t run into any faces he remembers from his childhood, but it’s only a matter of time. He knows that they didn’t manage to burn them all.

Alec is twenty and he is set to train at the New York Institute every day and become a true shadowhunter. He is expected to move into the Institute and become a productive demon slayer, in exchange for a salary and forgiveness for leaving.

They stay one night at the New York Institute before Alec’s fingers are twitching for a lighter. Most of the monsters of his childhood are gone, but he cannot stand to sleep surrounded by so many unknown Shadowhunters. They huddle together that night, none of them sleeping a wink.

The Lightwoods agree to the training on the condition that they do not have to live at the Institute. While Alec has been all but living at Magnus’s loft, he spends the next night in the apartment he rents with his siblings. None of them feel stable after a night at the Institute.

They pick up their training where they left off as children, and they do not speak of Max while in the Institute walls. He has shown no interest in this life and they are not going to take him down with them. He is enjoying sixth grade and they are going to let him.

Magnus asks him if what he said at his trial was the truth. Alec doesn’t know why Magnus asks questions to which he already knows the answers. They don’t talk about it for a year, but Magnus catalogues Alec’s distaste for the Institute and every rotten word he says about the place and its people.

 

 

 

Jace is nineteen and at a Shadowhunter ball when he feels every muscle in his brother’s back stiffen. He follows Alec’s eyes to a woman with blonde hair and a ruby choker. The lines of her face are deeper than he remembers.

She won’t remember them. Maybe she won’t even remember what she _did_ , all of the moments she made the Lightwoods feel like they were less than human.

Jace grips Alec’s elbow. His teeth grind. Alec catches his gaze, and his eyes are aflame. They both think of ways they could do this, but they catch on the way Isabelle is laughing in Clary’s arms across the room. They don’t want to spoil her fun.

The next night, Alec kisses Magnus before he meets Jace outside of the Institute. When Alec comes home he smells like sweat and dirt and he’s more brittle than Magnus has ever seen.

Magnus has put up with this secrecy for years, and the next day Magnus proposes a truth for a truth. He even lets Alec go first, and his first question isn’t as cutting as it could be. _Why did you stay with Camille for so long if you knew she was going to hurt you?_

Magnus tells Alec everything he could ever want to know about Camille. In return, he asks Alec where he was on Christmas five years ago. Alec’s expression doesn’t change when he says he was at the New York Institute, and Magnus says he doesn’t look like much of an arsonist. Alec grins sharply and tells him it was Jace’s idea.

Magnus wonders what horrible things happened in that Institute for it to deserve to be burned, but he doesn’t ask. Not yet. He won’t ask Alec to give up every part of him in one night. Besides, he’s no stranger to Alec waking up gasping for breath.

 

 

 

One night, Alec surprises Magnus by asking him about the timer on his wrist. Alec’s own timer reads hundreds of years, and Magnus knows that it could apply to him but that it might not. He might die in hundreds of years, or he might die tomorrow.

Alec asks Magnus if he thinks he’s wasting time being with Alec when his soulmate is going to die in the next couple of years. Magnus doesn’t say that his soulmate could very well be Alec, because Alec has a fragile air about him. Instead he says that it was impossible to know who his soulmate is and that he’ll spend his life following his heart, not the clock on his wrist. It doesn’t matter because he’s happy where he is.

 

 

 

Alec is twenty-five and there’s a ring on his finger. The event was supposed to be about Isabelle and Clary, finally married, but Magnus had dropped on one knee while they’d been walking in the garden at the reception. Alec had hesitated, thinking of how little time he had left. But he loves Magnus. He wants to make Magnus as happy as he can for the rest of his life.

Magnus deserves better than him, but Alec says yes anyway. They are married the next month, and Alec is more than aware that the timer on Magnus’s wrist will zero-out soon. He spends his last days like they matter.

On Christmas he disappears. He leaves his siblings notes that wish them the best and tell them that he’s not coming back.

On Christmas, Magnus Bane wakes up to an empty apartment. On the kitchen counter he finds a ring and a note that says _I’m Sorry_. He tears apart the city looking for his husband, but his wrist says a dooming zero. Max locks himself in his room and spends the next week buried in historical tomes.

Isabelle is crying in the apartment she shares with Clary. Jace is on the couch, halfway through a bottle of rum. There’s a bottle of coke in the fridge, but he’s past that. Their brother is gone.

 

 

 

It takes Magnus a month to piece together what happened. There had always been something strange in the way that Alec held himself. There were holes in his stories, mysteries in how he’d gained a mundane life for himself and his siblings. Isabelle and Jace didn’t know how Alec did it; they never asked. Magus wonders if they cared for him at all, but he knows that they were probably just too desperate for change to think about the costs.

The situation sits on his skin and sinks into him. It is familiar.

Magnus opens a portal to Edom and stands before the devil. The devil smiles at him and asks him if he’s come for a soul. Magnus looks this devil in the eyes.

“Father,” he says. “I propose a trade.”

 

 

 


End file.
